Revision as of 16:53, 4 November 2012

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What is a 3D Mouse?

"Also known as bats, flying mice, or wands, these devices generally function through ultrasound and provide at least three degrees of freedom. Probably the best known example would be 3DConnexion/Logitech's SpaceMouse from the early 1990s." - Wikipedia

7. You can run the driver manually by calling it like this (for USB version):

$> sudo /etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv -d USB

8. You should now have a working 3D mouse in Arch Linux!
You can test it by extracting the demos from the driver archive.

$> tar xfz 3dxware-linux-v1-5-2.i386.tar.gz xcube
$> ./xcube

Open Source Drivers

There exists also an open source driver for 3Dconnexion devices maintained by the spacenav project.
Unfortunately the list of supported applications is very short.
Actually there is only one major software supporting the spacenav driver, namely the 3D creation suite Blender.
For it to work three things must be fulfilled

The device must be recognized by the kernel as input device

The spacenavd daemon must be running

The application must be compiled with spacenav support. (community/blender isn't)

The first requirement should be fulfilled automatically after plugging in the device.
It can be checked by looking if the device is listed in /proc/bus/input/devices e.g. by

If it works you can simply shut down the daemon by hitting CTRL-C and run it using sudo /etc/rc.d/spacenavd start.
On a systemd-only system the following service script can be used to start the daemon with sudo systemctl start spacenavd.service